thundersong

Your breath rattles with every inhalation and the tears cascade over the brims of your eyes, plunging down the cliffs of your cheeks. You bury your face in your hands, trying to control the squeaks of your sobs from waking your parents. One whimper escapes, but you realize it is the same pitch as the car-lock that just went off outside and that, if they are awake, they won’t know the sound of their daughter’s suffering from the beep of an automobile. 

The screen of your computer goes to sleep, leaving you in utter darkness and blind. It’s for the better. The lack of light behind you prevents you from seeing the monster reflected in the black screen, her swollen eyes and puffy, acne-ridden cheeks invisible to you. But the darkness crushes you. The oxygen in the room seems to dissipate. Your lungs struggle for breath but all you can do is cry.

You tap the trackpad to illuminate the screen again. There you see the assignment that you printed not long ago. Chemistry. It’s due the next day, and easy work. Work you could have done days ago, while you sat on the internet and procrastinated living. Now it’s one in the morning and all you’ve done is print it.

The despair overtakes you again.

They run through your mind ceaselessly, a montage of your past and future failures. Calculus. Physics. Organic Chemistry. Professional school. Each one hits you with the force of a thunderstorm, drowning you in a monsoon of inadequacy.

You divert your eyes from the screen. Anything to escape those words. Your gaze lights upon the kitchen utensil drawer across from you. A dark, disgusting idea forms in your mind.

“No.”

Your logical mind revolts. “You’re stronger than that. Stronger than them. If you give in to this, you’re only as weak as you make yourself out to be.” But you don’t listen. Your breath has stopped on the inhalation, the idea consuming you, driving you forward. Like a ghost you peel yourself off the kitchen seat and float towards the drawer containing the scissors.

But when you open the drawer, they’re not there. Grimly you debate the possibility that the world is trying to prevent you from doing what you imagined. Then you realize the scissors have been in your pocket the whole time, placed carelessly there after you trimmed your bangs. 

You draw them out slowly. They are warm from being held so close to the skin they are about to destroy.

You pull up your pant leg and, with the grace of the ex-ballerina you are, rest your ankle gently on the counter. You see your pulse jumping under the blue veins, clamouring for safety. The tears begin to flow again as you lay the blade next to those veins, and you close your eyes and grit your teeth.

But you can’t do it.

With the same lack of determination that has put you in this situation, all you can do is press the blade into the armour of your skin, too weak to cut it, too frail or break it, too timid to destroy. There is no pain aside from what you inflict on your inner self, the punishments you wreak upon yourself for failing. Numbly you draw the warm blade gently down your skin, hardly making a scratch. There will be no mark in the morning to remind you of your weakness. Dimly you question how the others can be so strong to have accomplished this. 

You snap the blades shut and return them to the drawer, where they will eventually lose the heat of your unbroken skin. You pointedly ignore the still-undone assignment on your desk and climb into bed, shutting yourself under the covers into the darkness. Your heartbeat mocks you, ringing rhythmically through your ears. You try to shut out the noise of your own existence by falling victim to the sobs of yet another failure.